Synesius of Cyrene

Mosaic depicting an angel. Museum of Ptolemais

Synesius
of Cyrene (c.370-c.413) was a Neo-Platonic
philosopher who became bishop of Ptolemais
in the Cyrenaica.
He left behind a small corpus of texts that offer much information
about daily life in Late Antiquity, and about the
christianization
of the Roman world.

Letter
74,
written in 402, is offered here in the translation by A.
Fitzgerald. Cf. Letter 1.

Letter 74: The "Eulogy of Baldness"

I have just sent you the treatise, written in Attic style and of
finished workmanship.[1]
If it obtains the approbation of Pylaemenes, the most critical of our
audience, this very fact will be quite sufficient to recommend it to
posterity. But if my book seems to you a frivolous production, remember
that it is always permissible to treat light subjects lightly.